I've started birding
Dec. 14th, 2020 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8and it's SO fun. One of my friends through ingress convinced me I should buy a pair of entry level binoculars and it's probably one of the best purchases I made this year. I can see tiny little sparrows so clearly, I can ID raptors flying far above me, and they are so easy to use - honestly, the difference between these (Celestron's NatureDX, about a hundred twenty USD) and every other pair of cheap binoculars I've ever used is night and day. I could never get the others to work and they made me dizzy. These are a dream to use comfortably and super sturdy and waterproof, I love them.
To ID, I use Merlin, which is an app created by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. You put in the date and place of viewing, then estimate the size of the bird (smaller than a sparrow? the size of a robin? bigger than a goose?) and up to 3 colours, and what kind of habitat you saw it (swimming, soaring about, in a tree, etc) and then it gives you possibilities. With all the criteria it's not a long list and it's way easier than using paper field guides. When you start out you have no idea if it's a finch or a warbler! And since the app is made by Cornell, it pulls from the Macaulay Library, so there are about a half dozen clear photographs accompanying each bird description, as well a bunch of sound files for calls and songs so you can confirm the id by sound too. It's awesome.
I like solo activities generally, like being shut up in my room to do my projects, and I like that birding works well solo. I hike with other people usually since I'm afraid of breaking an ankle and having to be rescued - I'm not afraid of wildlife but am of my own fallibility, lol - but hiking with other people after an objective like "hike the trail to x point" means we go quickly through the terrain and also we are loud. But hiking solo means stopping whenever (and for however long) I want, staring into trees, standing still hoping that I'll see birds. And I do!!
Getting to forests is hard so I don't go that often - no car - but fortunately while I live in the city I live in walking distance of some very green parks. I actually cross the street and go to bird at the pond pretty much most lunches, just so I can take a break, and there's always a huge flock of Canadian geese hanging out there, a good dozen mallards, and also a great blue heron (majestic and definitely a Cool Dude) and a double creasted cormorant (hangs out on a tree branch that sticks out of the middle of the pond) who live there. The magic of the binoculars is that while I've known for years there are mallards and Canadian geese who live there, I've never ever noticed the cormorant or the heron or a bunch of other birds that clearly live/visit there all the time. It's honestly like being given the secret to seeing hidden things. And there are lots of my hobbies that intersect with this - ingress, letterboxing, etc.
The other interesting thing is that birding is obviously a huge and old hobby, and also practiced by people with incredibly deep pockets. Since Merlin is built by Cornell, they also have a connection between the app (main focus: bird identification for beginner/intermediate) -> ebird.com, which is as far as I can tell, a way to harness citizen observations to power ornithology science*. This is a hobby that is very much geared towards catch-em-all, and dear god, does ebird's myaccount backend cater to this: logging in immediately shows you your Life List, aka all the birds you have confidently identified, broken down by various categories like region. It's also got a little bit of socialness to it, built in; for example, people can see your profile and your life list if you choose to make both public. It's generally accepted there's about ten thousand bird species worldwide. There are people on the site who have a life list of 9,500+ birds. That's people who have seen the vast majority of this planet's birds. That's a huge investment of time and money into travel, equipment, tours, standing in one place staring into scopes, etc. I feel not at all weird about my hours into videogaming or fandom or whatever.
*So cool - even without being a scientist there are lots of processed data you can look at. For example, since there is just SUCH granular coverage, far greater than any consortium of university scientists could ever hope to cover (just think of how much grant money would be required to fund it!) there are incredible maps, species by species, of migratory behaviour, where they currently are at what time. It's so neat to see them move - it must be so cool to see all sorts of unusual birds migrate through the prairie states/provinces in North America.
To ID, I use Merlin, which is an app created by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. You put in the date and place of viewing, then estimate the size of the bird (smaller than a sparrow? the size of a robin? bigger than a goose?) and up to 3 colours, and what kind of habitat you saw it (swimming, soaring about, in a tree, etc) and then it gives you possibilities. With all the criteria it's not a long list and it's way easier than using paper field guides. When you start out you have no idea if it's a finch or a warbler! And since the app is made by Cornell, it pulls from the Macaulay Library, so there are about a half dozen clear photographs accompanying each bird description, as well a bunch of sound files for calls and songs so you can confirm the id by sound too. It's awesome.
I like solo activities generally, like being shut up in my room to do my projects, and I like that birding works well solo. I hike with other people usually since I'm afraid of breaking an ankle and having to be rescued - I'm not afraid of wildlife but am of my own fallibility, lol - but hiking with other people after an objective like "hike the trail to x point" means we go quickly through the terrain and also we are loud. But hiking solo means stopping whenever (and for however long) I want, staring into trees, standing still hoping that I'll see birds. And I do!!
Getting to forests is hard so I don't go that often - no car - but fortunately while I live in the city I live in walking distance of some very green parks. I actually cross the street and go to bird at the pond pretty much most lunches, just so I can take a break, and there's always a huge flock of Canadian geese hanging out there, a good dozen mallards, and also a great blue heron (majestic and definitely a Cool Dude) and a double creasted cormorant (hangs out on a tree branch that sticks out of the middle of the pond) who live there. The magic of the binoculars is that while I've known for years there are mallards and Canadian geese who live there, I've never ever noticed the cormorant or the heron or a bunch of other birds that clearly live/visit there all the time. It's honestly like being given the secret to seeing hidden things. And there are lots of my hobbies that intersect with this - ingress, letterboxing, etc.
The other interesting thing is that birding is obviously a huge and old hobby, and also practiced by people with incredibly deep pockets. Since Merlin is built by Cornell, they also have a connection between the app (main focus: bird identification for beginner/intermediate) -> ebird.com, which is as far as I can tell, a way to harness citizen observations to power ornithology science*. This is a hobby that is very much geared towards catch-em-all, and dear god, does ebird's myaccount backend cater to this: logging in immediately shows you your Life List, aka all the birds you have confidently identified, broken down by various categories like region. It's also got a little bit of socialness to it, built in; for example, people can see your profile and your life list if you choose to make both public. It's generally accepted there's about ten thousand bird species worldwide. There are people on the site who have a life list of 9,500+ birds. That's people who have seen the vast majority of this planet's birds. That's a huge investment of time and money into travel, equipment, tours, standing in one place staring into scopes, etc. I feel not at all weird about my hours into videogaming or fandom or whatever.
*So cool - even without being a scientist there are lots of processed data you can look at. For example, since there is just SUCH granular coverage, far greater than any consortium of university scientists could ever hope to cover (just think of how much grant money would be required to fund it!) there are incredible maps, species by species, of migratory behaviour, where they currently are at what time. It's so neat to see them move - it must be so cool to see all sorts of unusual birds migrate through the prairie states/provinces in North America.
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Date: Dec. 15th, 2020 12:51 am (UTC)Also, agreed, great blue herons are such Cool Dudes. I live near a marsh and I never get tired of looking at 'em.
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Date: Dec. 15th, 2020 04:14 am (UTC)Always so broody and stand-offish! :D
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Date: Dec. 17th, 2020 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Dec. 20th, 2020 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Dec. 20th, 2020 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Dec. 20th, 2020 04:35 am (UTC)haha I would try to help but I'm barely less noob than you are and don't know what's common on the west coast... There are videos of common backyard bird calls in $region on youtube though, if you want to try to figure out what the bird is!
Oooh, great question! I guess 2 - I saw this barred owl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barred_owl#/media/File:Strix-varia-005.jpg) while hiking, it was SO cool and just fluffed up in a tree. And then on this super windy day I went to a sand marsh and saw 2 peregrine falcons!!